Archive for the dream Category
Last night I had a dream that shook me…
It is one of those summer days in Oklahoma when you can see the mirage on the tarmac in front of you, stretching on to the horizon. Lizards and tarantulas are running from one side of the road to the other in an effort to get off of the sun baked road. There is not a cloud in the sky. No chance for shade or cooling rains, just clear blue skies and an oppressive sun that seems determined to pull all moisture from the lands.
I look back into the third row to a man who is telling my grandfather to speed up. He is late for something and agitated.
“Come on, hurry up dammit,” he says to my grandfather, looking at him in the rear-view mirror.
My grandfather looks at him in the mirror and smiles. It is the smile of a demon, something I have never seen on his face before and it terrifies me. My veins freeze, my blood becomes ice as my soul flickers away for a moment. The gas pedal is mashed to the floor and the giant V8 engine explodes with energy as the gas is dumped by the gallon into the carburetor.
I take up a lot of the backseat. I am not a small man. My shoulders more than cover my own seat, giving little room for my grandmother to move around in her own space, but she seems fine with this as she clings to my side. Her hands are in my own now, as she closes her eyes and leans into my arm. She is a small woman, made small by the ravages of time. Her back is bent, and the arthritis has turned her fingers, ever so slightly, to the inside of her hands. Her tears roll down my arm. I am not sure what her tears are for a moment, and I check to see if I am bleeding. (Irrational thought in an irrational dream does not seem out of place.)
“Pull over,” I finally say to my grandfather but he pays no attention to the tiny voice in the backseat. The voice that has just come from my mouth sounds strangely familiar to me, but it is not my own.
I saw myself now as the camera would see me, but this time I am not the 36 year old man sitting beside his frail grandmother, but rather I am the ten year old clinging to her for assurance. There is panic in my eyes and breath is coming faster and faster as terror takes control. That voice that wanted to demand that we pull over was from the mind of a 36 year old former United State Marine, but the voice that had come out, well, that was from the 5th grader who needed his grandfather to hug him.
Again the SUV swerves as my grandfather lists in and out of lucidity. A semi truck carrying crushed cars to a dump is ahead of us for a moment. I can see the cars and I wonder at the lives that they had carried in them for all of those years. Where are those people now, who have they become, are they as scared as I am at this moment?
“I said pull over Grandpa,” this time the voice is right and true, it is my own again and there is command in it. My grandmother looks up and gives me her smile that tells me she is proud and happy of what I have just done. Grandpa looks at me for a moment in the rear-view mirror and then a realization seems to break over his face. He looks at her, suddenly ashamed, and tears well up in his eyes. He turns around in his seat, looking at us instead of in the mirror now, he slows the SUV and pulls to the shoulder.
I open the door as the tires roll to a stop and my feet his the ground with a skid. Pulling my grandmother out from the leather seat I hold her for a moment just to make sure she is steady her and then I reach for the handle on the front door but before I can take hold the SUV roars to life, tires complain as they break free from the tarmac and the world seems to slow around me.
It was at this point that Michael Bay took over directing my dream. In an insane action sequence I race along side the SUV for a moment before I leap onto the shiny chrome back bumper. My grandfather, lost again in his delusions, swerves from lane to lane and back again across the highway, as always in an effort to beat the other drives to the destination. Cars and trucks zoom past me, the drivers, shocked and scared are honking and waving at me as my grandfather races to his goal. Holding onto the car in various ridiculous fashions, a car door handle here, the roof rack there, I make my way from the back of the vehicle to drivers side window with my feet on the nerf bar.
“Stop Grandpa, stop,” I plead with him, one hand on the window and the other holding onto the luggage rack. He looks at me through the window, and for a moment there is nothing there, no memory, not recognition of who I am or even that a person is clinging to the car he is driving, but then, slowly, his eyes soften and his smile returns, my Grandpa wakes up for a moment.
“I can’t, I don’t know how,” he whimpers to me, shaking his head. He is asking for my help, he needs for me to change the situation, but I am stuck there, holding onto the outside of a speeding SUV, lest I fall to my own death. As I look into his eyes for a moment everything is alright again. We are lost in a timeless moment, back on the little acreage where I grew up with him, and he is strong again, younger, and taking care of me instead of weak, feeble and frail with age.
The rev of the engine snaps my attention back to the road and our precarious situation. I look forward on the highway and see a tollbooth racing towards us. It is all cement, glass and steel; unmoving and uncaring that we are about to destroy ourselves as we smash into it at 80 miles per hour in this death trap. I look back to Grandpa and he is lost again, he doesn’t remember that his grandson is clinging to the car, he doesn’t understand that tollbooth is going to kill him in an instant.
In his mind he is driving back to the farm from working at the flour mill in Blackwell. The road is dirt, but recently graded and smooth enough for his daddy’s Chevy. His brothers are with him and they are talking about fighting in Europe again. This thing is going to get out of hand, he thinks to himself as he listens his eldest brother reading the newspaper aloud.
The sound of shearing metal and shattering glass assaults me as we slam into the little air-conditioned room at more than 90 miles per hour. My body is destroyed by a million daggers of glass and metal as the front of the SUV opens a gash in the room. The last sight I see with my own eyes is the generic office wall clock that momentarily hangs on the opposite wall of the booth, 11:40 eternal. It is falling now, in a spastic pirouette of energy as the building around it disintegrates in a cataclysm.
The moment freezes in place; tiny, gleaming shards of glass hang suspended in the air, mixed with perfectly round globes of what has to be my blood. Sound is gone now too, I can no longer hear the road noise, or the engine, or even the sounds of the crash; there is only silence…
The sound of my own whimpers brought me close to waking at this point, but I could not break free from the dream until my wife shook me and held on tight telling me that everything was okay. But, my eyes were open now and the room was dark in the predawn hours… I crawled out of bed, told Abbey to come with me and we went to sit on the porch. I sat there in the muggy darkness, listening to the sounds of a sleeping world, patting my dog as she sat beside me.
The group, ten or more of us, walked in silence under the beech trees. The sun was low in the sky and the shadows where coming at strange angles, making it look like there was something moving just out of my eyesight. I was in the middle, watching those in front while trying to keep the few behind me up with us, they kept trying to stop; they were too tired now.
I knew we had to keep going, I knew we could not stay the night in the woods. No shelter, no where to put your back and know you were safe from at least on direction.
“I have to stop here, this is where I stop,” she said leaning against a sapling.
“Just a little further, out of the woods and we find somewhere to sleep. I promise.” I lied.
My clothes where wool and cotton, they hung from my frame loosely and chafed my skin from the sweat and heat. The boots on my feet were tight, but only because my feet had swollen after days on the trail. Sweat poured down my face, off my nose. My hair, long and auburn, was tied in a tail and blew easy in the breeze.
I stopped and told the group to listen. Dogs barking in the distance. Hounds, closing in and coming fast - nothing left to do now but run.
***
We run into a train station. The walls are white washed and dusty, doors are mostly red paint and shut, but a few seem to sway with unseen hands opening them to see who we are.
One of the women bolts for a doorway, screaming that she has to find him. Her son has died on the trail and she cannot seem to remember that he is dead and buried. I race to the doorway that she went in, but she is not there, I can see down the hall a long way, further than she could have covered even at a run, but it is empty now, she is gone.
I turn, I hear a pounding footfall, I begin to pass out and just as I close my eyes I see her son, standing in an open loading dock.
“Evil,” I scream.
***
“Evil,” I screamed as my wife woke me this morning in the darkness.
No, this is not turning in to another dream journal, I just want to make sure I remember the cool ones. If you don’t like these, I am sure I will be back to my esoteric musings soon.
I am in the most amazing buffet ever. Perfectly grilled steaks, lobster tail, beautiful sushi of every flavor abound. Every fruit and vegetable I have ever seen and then some I haven’t too. My plate is overflowing with pasta, meats and sushi, I am in heaven.The giant room, filled with people at tables and in the lines for more food, is alive with sounds; laughter, conservations and the clinking of silverware on china. There are glowing candlelit sconces on the walls and on every table there is a candle centerpiece. The floor is covered with a rich burgundy carpet that is accented with golden crowns laid out in a tile-like pattern.
I sit my plate down on a table not far from the buffet. There was only one place setting open at the table, and I knew it was mine. I can smell hot, fresh breads coming out of the ovens and I walk quickly to the line waiting for the breads, rolls and muffins. I see the roll I want and my mouth waters. It is very large, round, cooked to a golden brown and someone has just laid a round of sweet butter on its steaming crown.
And then it is gone. A woman in the line has grabbed it with tongs and off it goes. My world crashes down around me. Lost is the thrill of the buffet, gone are the thoughts of the food I was about to gobble up and the happiness I felt just seeing the foods. Like a fire pit with out flame or a flower that is shriveled on the vine, I am empty.
I woke up there, it was about 3AM this morning. I sat up in bed, looked at the time and smiled that it was still dark outside. The bedroom was filled with a soft orange glow from the salt lamp. I fell back asleep then.
I am a tall, older black man in a jungle. I carry in my arms a small boy, he is listless and his eyes are barely open. I continue to talk to him, asking him questions, his name, where he is from, where he was going. He doesn’t answer me, just lays there in my arms, whispering something I can’t make out.
I know that the only thing I can do is to get him into cold water. I need to lower his body temperature and soon. I make my way over the underbrush to a swiftly flowing river. The water is crystal clear, I can see the bottom of the river. It is green and lush on the riverbed. The water is ice cold.
It flows from a mountain top down here, to the floor of the valley where the jungle covered and hid it from the sun.
I lay the boy down on the smooth river rocks and dig out a shallow trench. I want to make a bath tub in the ground and let some of the water flow over him, I know this will heal him. After the tub has been dug out I pull him in to the opening in the ground and then I dig out a small ditch to get the water in to the tub with him.
I look up then, through the green leaves into the sunlight and pray that he will recover.
I don’t know what they mean, or if they mean anything at all; but there they are. If they mean anything to you, let me know.
Light and Love,
Matt